This essay considers medieval long distance trades in grain, cattle, and preserved fish as antecedents to today’s globalised movements of foodstuffs.
Content Index
With this issue of Environment and History, van Dam contributes to the thesis that the expansion of trade systems and the emergence of large-scale human intervention in (formerly) natural ecosystems is a continuous, interactive process with a long history, long before the Industrial Revolution or the discovery of the New Worlds.
The authors identify two distinct forms of masculinity, Australian and Cuban, and proceed to show how men and their rhetoric are overtaken, then transformed, by political and environmental developments not of their choosing.
Based on a case study of the Central Rainlands of Sudan, the paper challenges the assumptions and principles underlying the tragedy of the commons model and the property rights paradigm with regard to sustainability of resources owned in common.
The emergence of native fauna as a theme in conservation is used to explore the changing relationship between nature and human culture in late nineteenth century and early to mid-twentieth century Australia.
This paper traces the history of human-environment interactions in the Pacific Islands during the last millennium, focusing on three main periods: the Little Climatic Optimum, the Little Ice Age, and, in greatest detail, the transition around AD 1300 between the two.
The introduction of histories of nature in the late eighteenth century posed the epistemological problem of how to bring the diversity of empirical laws into theoretical unity…
Mention of the island nation of Madagascar conjures up images of exotic nature, rampant deforestation, and destructive erosion. Popular descriptions of the island frequently include phrases such as ‘ecological mayhem’ or ‘barren landscape.’
The forest area in Switzerland has been expanding for more than one hundred years, after a long period of contraction culminating in an apparently accelerated phase of deforestation in the first half of the nineteenth century…
The paper provides a case study of the range of preoccupations which the statutory planner, agricultural interests and mineral developer brought to bear on the conflict arising from the early twentieth-century development of the Yorkshire ‘concealed’ coalfield.